Establishing a Modern Digital Banking Experience

Client

In a market with over 100 million tech-savvy millennials and over 50% of business owners under the age of 35, the Middle East was ready for an entirely new approach to banking. Luckily, a leading Middle East bank saw the opportunity and reached out to Hexaware to partner in capitalizing on this opportunity.

The goal was to create a holistic, personalized financial solution built around customer needs and aspirations. It would align bank products and services around customers’ lifestyles and give them the tools and resources to achieve their financial goals.

Challenge

To create a completely different Middle East bank, the team had to execute on a rigorous strategy that included: 

• Conducting in-depth research of the new bank’s target market to understand their goals, struggles, fears, and ambitions
• Strategizing a plan for success and tracking execution against these goals to meet KPIs
• Creating an engaging and technically flexible design that eliminated the need for a brick-and-mortar store
• Setting the bar high to create a standard platform upon which all others will eventually be measured

Solution

We brought a team of strategists, creatives, and engineers to partner with our client in realizing their full vision. The team proudly built the first cloud-based, digital bank in the Middle East to meet the ongoing demand from its growing population of young people. The team’s focus was always about creating a customer-centric solution that would help people with their entire financial health, going beyond banking.

The team started by defining an initial value proposition and enterprise architecture design for the bank. This level of strategy and planning helped everyone uncover any friction in the process to be addressed and accounted for when building the digital bank.

Part of the project was built with Backbase, the leader in digital-first banking software. The Backbase platform brings together data and functionality from traditional core systems and new FinTech players into a seamless, omnichannel experience. As we moved through the project, we focused on the customer, adding features that would make every person feel special and rewarded.

Benefits

The new app was built around the customer, improving user experience at every touch point. Making the achievement of financial goals more seamless is immediately evident due to a dramatically shortened onboarding process, in many cases shifting the process from days long to mere minutes.  Additional app features include easy, goal-oriented budget setting, simplified bill splitting through payment requests, and a 24/7 in-app smart chat assistant for customer assistance.

 Results of the focus on user experience have included: 

• 62% improvement in new customer acquisition
• 60+% increase in digital revenue
• 8 star user reviews

Future feature development will continue the effort to be much more than a digital bank—but rather, provide the next wave of technology to support customers in their everyday lives.

Summary

Hexaware is proud to have contributed to this digital banking project, resulting in a user-friendly platform that offers a transparent overview of finances. All features in this innovative digital bank will change how young people in the Middle East experience banking.

The commitment from our client to innovation is sure to kickstart digital transformation trends for multiple businesses in this region, and we look forward to seeing what the future holds for years to come.